How Fela Kuti Channeled James Brown’s Funk to Spark His Own Revolution

 Additional reporting and research from John Kennedy.

Sometimes serendipity looks just like an empty bank account. At least it did for Fela Kuti. Following a series of self-funded U.S. shows with his band in 1969, the Nigerian innovator found himself flat broke in Los Angeles after being conned by janky promoters. But that turn of events set him on the road to mining a brand-new musical bag that found inspiration in America’s Black Power movement — specifically, the legendary funk of James Brown.

Fela spent the 1960s shaping the sound he coined, Afrobeat — a blend of highlife, salsa, calypso, funk, and jazz. His extended time in the States inspired him to expand those sonic influences, turning Black American plight and the scars of colonial oppression at home into a propulsive, diasporic bassline for Pan-African resistance. 

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It all started when Fela and his Koola Lobitos band became hip to a fellow trailblazer in Brown, whose legend was already sprouting in America and the African diaspora. The Godfather of Funk reoriented musical traditions with a new rhythmic feng shui. Whereas most soundscapes of the era focused on the percussion’s backbeat, Brown’s emphasis on the downbeat and syncopated rhythms helped define funk, and, years later, hip-hop. Simultaneously, he galvanized Black Americans with a self-pride anthem that reverberated through the ages. 

Amid interminable shellshock from racist church bombings and assassinated leaders, Brown’s 1968 classic “Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud” rang through like a thunderstorm of sunshine, with its funky bassline and call-and-response chorus structure becoming their own acts of defiance. It was a command to self-love. Repeating the refrain meant you accepted the challenge. And the twitchy grooves only made it a dancefloor magnet. If, as Gil Scott-Heron said, the revolution wouldn’t be televised, it could now be played on the radio. It’s unclear when Fela heard the cut, but it was inescapable by the time he and his bandmates arrived in L.A. For many, it was a refuge. 

Fela and company found their own literal escape when they reached California in late 1969. At the time, their concert promoters had been largely MIA, only emerging to prevent them from signing other contracts and, eventually, to inform authorities that their visas had expired. With their pockets nearly exhausted, Fela secured visa extensions. He then connected with Regalettes, a Black women’s social club that hired the musical troupe to perform at a local hotel. There, Kuti courted Black Panther affiliate Sandra Isidore (then known as Sandra Smith), who put him onto the Black Power movement, sharing with him books like Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X. 

“Music is the weapon,” Fela said in a 1982 interview. “Music is the weapon of the future.” With marijuana smoke in the air, James Brown in the zeitgeist, and liberation on his mind, Fela began sharpening his own weapon as he crystallized his sonic collage for freedom fighting. 

The first hint of Fela’s radicalization is The '69 Los Angeles Sessions, an engrossing snapshot of his musical metamorphosis that dropped in February 1970. That album’s first six tracks are characterized by highlife grooves he and his crew (renamed Nigeria 70) recorded in Africa. The next ten songs in the sequence reflected his newer sound — Afrobeat in utero. These fresher creations, which were recorded in Hollywood, would’ve sounded right at home on a James Brown record (see: “Funky Horn,” “My Lady Frustration”). Thematically, Fela’s music began to adopt the Black radical themes he learned from Sandra — ideas Brown had only just started to explore. 

Forged while under the rule of Nigerian dictatorships, Fela’s 1975 cut “Water No Get Enemy” addressed the politicization of H20. Grafting his wearily grand baritone onto a bed of horns, meandering percussion, and jumpy chords fit for a funky emperor walking through a Lagos street market, Fela laid bare that fundamental truth of water, death and rebirth: “If water kills your child, you'll use water / If a child is growing up, he'll use water / There's nothing you can do without using water / Nothing without water.”

Fela’s 1976 albums, Kalakuta Show and Zombie, offered fierce critiques of police and military corruption. The album cover for the former features an image of Fela screaming into a collage of faceless soldiers. The latter’s title track speaks to what he believed were thoughtless “zombies” performing acts of cruelty. The chorus mirrors the percussive, chant-like refrain structures of Brown and other funk musicians, with Fela retaining his own regional flourishes amid the mix: “Attention! Quick march! (Zombie) / Slow march! Left turn! (Zombie) / Right turn! About turn! (Zombie) / Double up! Salute! (Zombie).” Playful and infectious as it was pointed, it’s searing social satire framed in an eternal slap — Fela Kuti at his most potent. 

Fela’s defiance emboldened his audience. But it also made him vulnerable. By 1974, Nigerian military forces had already raided his home and beaten and arrested him. In February 1977, a thousand soldiers broke into Fela’s compound before brutalizing him and throwing his mother, Nigerian activist Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, from the building’s second floor. She died of her injuries two months later, but her teachings lived on, with Fela’s transformative art serving as an indomitable vehicle.

As ferociously political as he was musically dynamic, Fela Kuti’s exploits made him something more than a legend. Some call him the James Brown of Africa. But their politics were not the same. Although James Brown sang about Black pride, he skewed far more conservative than Fela. Brown renounced “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud,” suggesting in his autobiography that teaching race encourages separatism. He lamented losing mainstream appeal. Fela Kuti lost his mother. 

Despite differing motivations and outlooks on activism, you can’t deny the shared musical DNA between these two icons. Brown developed a noted respect for Fela after traveling to Nigeria to see him perform live, acknowledging a symbiotic musical kinship. “Some of the ideas my band was getting from [Kuti’s] band had come from me in the first place,” Brown said. “But that was okay with me. It made the music that much stronger.”

Through intra-diaspora collaboration — both known and unknown — Fela Kuti and James Brown offered differing yet convergent takes on the future of Black music. And Black existence. Pulling from the soul of African art, they presented their own individual soundtracks for revolution.